Some ten years before his time the state of knowledge with regard to flying in Europe was demonstrated by an order granted by the King of Portugal to Friar Lourenzo de Guzman, who claimed to have invented a flying machine capable of actual flight. The order stated that ‘In order to encourage the suppliant to apply himself with zeal toward the improvement of the new machine, which is capable of producing the effects mentioned by him, I grant unto him the first vacant place in my College of Barcelos or Santarem, and the first professorship of mathematics in my University of Coimbra, with the annual pension of 600,000 reis during his life.--Lisbon, 17th of March, 1709.’ What happened to Guzman when the non-existence of the machine was discovered is one of the things that is well outside the province of aeronautics. He was charlatan pure and simple, as far as actual flight was concerned, though he had some ideas respecting the design of hot-air balloons, according to Tissandier. (_La Navigation Aerienne._) His flying machine was to contain, among other devices, bellows to produce artificial wind when the real article failed, and also magnets in globes to draw the vessel in an upward direction and maintain its buoyancy. Some draughtsman, apparently gifted with as vivid imagination as Guzman himself, has given to the world an illustration of the hypothetical vessel; it bears some resemblance to Lana’s aerial ship, from which fact one draws obvious conclusions. A rather amusing claim to solving the problem of flight was made in the middle of the eighteenth century by one Grimaldi, a ‘famous and unique Engineer’ who, as a matter of actual fact, spent twenty years in missionary work in India, and employed the spare time that missionary work left him in bringing his invention to a workable state. The invention is described as a ‘box which with the aid of clockwork rises in the air, and goes with such lightness and strong rapidity that it succeeds in flying a journey of seven leagues in an hour. It is made in the fashion of a bird; the wings from end to end are 25 feet in extent. The body is composed of cork, artistically joined together and well fastened with metal wire, covered with parchment and feathers. The wings are made of catgut and whalebone, and covered also with the same parchment and feathers, and each wing is folded in three seams. In the body of the machine are contained thirty wheels of unique work, with two brass globes and little chains which alternately wind up a counterpoise; with the aid of six brass vases, full of a certain quantity of quicksilver, which run in some pulleys, the machine is kept by the artist in due equilibrium and balance. By means, then, of the friction between a steel wheel adequately tempered and a very heavy and surprising piece of lodestone, the whole is kept in a regulated forward movement, given, however, a right state of the winds, since the machine cannot fly so much in totally calm weather as in stormy.